Un cuento de hadas
2007 · 20m · España
Directed by Jota Linares
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
Little Red Riding Hood, Subo, Italia and Rebeca are four superheroines, four fairy godmothers, four prostitutes — but one day everything can change if they have to turn the industrial estate where they work into a modern fairy tale.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Four sex workers as fairy godmothers reclaiming an industrial estate as their own narrative—this is the kind of premise that makes pearl-clutchers uncomfortable and lesser scouts skip right past it, which is exactly why it lands. Linares isn't interested in your pity or your redemption arc; he's interested in subversion.
The collision of fairy tale grammar with sex work and urban decay shows formal ambition, though the execution occasionally strains under the weight of its own provocations—there's a lineage here (magical realism meets social cinema) that the film reaches toward but doesn't quite clarify into argument.
The decision to treat these four women as active architects of their own mythology rather than victims in a cautionary tale is what makes this work; it's a small tonal choice that reshapes the entire film's center of gravity, and Linares commits to it completely.